"Think of your gut as a living ecosystem that needs a bit of nurturing," says Dr James Kinross. Photo / Getty Images
From increasing your fibre intake to taking up gardening, these everyday habits can all benefit your digestive system.
When someone develops gut problems, or simply wants to improve their gut health, they often go in search of a panacea. They’ll start taking a supplement or another “gut health” product in the hopes of finding a shortcut to good digestive health.
Most of the time, these are unhelpful. There are no quick fixes for gut health but there are plenty of things you can do to look after yours. All of my tips are based on plenty of research but, ultimately, it boils down to common-sense habits that you stick to most of the time.
Think of your gut as a living ecosystem that needs a bit of nurturing.
I can’t recommend fibre enough for improving your gut health. It’s a carbohydrate found in food like vegetables, fruit, beans and wholegrains and we should all be trying very hard to hit the magic 30g per day. The average person is only eating half this amount and signs that you’re not getting enough include constipation, irregular bowel movements and feeling exhausted and washed out.
Fibre sucks up toxins and harmful molecules in the gut and feeds your gut microbes – the trillions of bacteria and fungi living in your digestive system that make up your gut microbiome. Having a diverse range of these gut bugs, has consistently been linked to better overall health. Getting enough fibre in your diet will not only nourish your gut microbiome but will also improve every aspect of your health. Adding in just 7g of fibre per day will lower your risk of heart attacks and strokes, while also improving your brain health, concentration and focus.
You do need to work to hit the daily target, bearing in mind that an apple only has 2g of fibre and a carrot has around 1.5g. To make sure I get enough, I often start my day with a bowl of bran flakes (5g of fibre) with a handful of berries (3g of fibre) and make sure I always get at least five portions of vegetables throughout the day.
Deleting your food delivery app will encourage you to cook more of your own food, meaning you can control what’s in your meals. If you rely on other people to make what you eat, you don’t know what’s in it and almost certainly aren’t getting enough fibre.
If you’re struggling to get enough fibre into your diet, a fibre supplement is absolutely fine. One example is psyllium husk, which is a bulking fibre that creates a gel in the gut and will improve your bowel habit. Another is inulin, which is a prebiotic fibre supplement, meaning it is a source of food for the “good” bacteria in the gut. I recommend inulin and take it regularly.
However, if you currently don’t consume enough fibre, make sure to increase your intake gradually, over a period of six to 12 weeks, to avoid bloating and gas.
Quitting alcohol is one of the best things you could do right now, not just for your gut, but for your overall health. Saying that, I still drink wine – but I try not to drink it too often. If you want to improve your gut health in a meaningful way, you’ve got to stop boozing frequently.
Alcohol can make it harder for the body to absorb vitamins and minerals from food, it damages the liver and worsens bloating and stomach pain and kills off the good bacteria living in our digestive system. Alcohol consumption is also a very important risk factor for many types of cancer, but especially bowel cancer, as it damages the cells that line the bowel, making it more likely that cancer will develop. We drink way too much in the UK and it has so many other adverse health outcomes.
If you are going to drink alcohol, there are things you can do to reduce the risk to your health beyond controlling your moderation. Stay well hydrated, avoid alcoholic drinks that have a high alcohol content. Some light beers, which are fermented and contain living microbes and yeast, won’t be as harmful as spirits. Similarly, red wine, in moderation may not be too bad for our gut because it contains polyphenols.
So much of our alcohol is full of sugar and ultra-processed ingredients that are really, really bad for you. If it’s a blue alcopop, don’t drink it. You don’t have to live like a monk or nun and completely abstain, but minimising your intake will make a big difference.
For the sake of your gut health, go and put your hands in the soil and grow a plant. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have an outdoor space – get a window box or even just an indoor plant.
Soil is the most diverse microbial ecosystem we have on the planet, with a single cubic centimetre containing up to 50,000 different species of microbes, which can make their way into our gut when we touch our mouth and face. This is good news, as it increases the diversity and types of bugs living in our gut – something that has been linked with better overall health.
Obviously, if you’re handling thorny plants, you should wear gardening gloves and you should wash your hands after tending to your plants – but don’t overdo it. Since Covid, we’ve become too obsessed with hygiene – you don’t need to drown yourself in alcohol gel every time you’ve had any interaction with the outside world. Let the beneficial bacteria and fungi make their way to your gut.
Exercising regularly, ideally four or five times a week for at least 30 to 40 minutes, will do wonders for your gut and overall health. Research shows that active people tend to have more diverse gut microbiomes and more “good” gut bacteria. There’s also a long list of other benefits – most notably for your heart, waistline and brain.
I took up cycling because it was good for my gut health and it also helped me to lose a bit of weight and left me feeling much better about myself. It’s also an activity I do with friends, which is good for overall health and is also good for my gut as it transfers good bacteria.
You don’t need to be an ultra-marathon runner. The people who would most benefit from exercise are those who are the most sedentary. For these people, it’s about the small gains. Just getting out for a walk four or five times a week will give some benefit.
In 2025, most of us live in urban environments. Family sizes are getting smaller. We’re becoming more socially isolated. Many people don’t connect with others in a meaningful way, particularly middle-aged and elderly men. This is a disaster for our health in general, but also our gut health.
Gut health requires real-world social connectivity. People who are part of a large, complex social network have a more diverse microbiome and a healthier gut. This is because physical contact facilitates the transfer of microbes between people – whether it’s sharing a meal, shaking hands or hugging. A proper snog will transfer up to 80 million microbes.
Get into a pattern of life where you have daily connection, whether that’s in the office, meeting up with friends or spending time with loved ones at home. No matter how short, it will have some benefit.
Really, really, really don’t take antibiotics unless you absolutely need them. The only time you should use them is if you have a bacterial infection and your doctor says you need the medicine, in which case, of course take the antibiotic – it can be life-saving.
As a society, we take way too many antibiotics unnecessarily. Often, it’s because we ask the doctor to prescribe them when we don’t really need them, such as when we have a viral infection (which antibiotics will not work against).
Another way we consume them is through our diet. Antibiotics are misused in the production of the foods that we eat, especially through meat as they can be used as a growth product. If you give an animal lots of antibiotics, they get fatter and reach market weight faster. There are UK and EU rules preventing that, but it still happens.
The reason this is so important is that so much of the harm that is done to our gut is by the destruction of microbes. Antibiotics are the number one driver of that – they create an internal climate crisis, a catastrophic loss of microbes that define so much of our health.
If you are taking a one-off course of penicillin, it will have very little impact on your gut. The problem comes if you’re having broad-spectrum antibiotics repeatedly in life, the consequences can be long-lasting and very profound. If this occurs in childhood, it increases the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes and asthma, and even the risk of bowel cancer. It also has a big impact on our immune system and gut function.
If you have had to take antibiotics, I recommend eating plenty of plant-based foods like vegetables, fruit and legumes; tucking into food that is naturally high in prebiotic fibres, like chicory and bananas; and having some fermented foods. Additionally, having a multi-strain, high-dose probiotic supplement for eight weeks, as it can prevent some of the complications from antibiotics, like diarrhoea, and encourage “good” bacteria to grow in the gut.
To limit antibiotics in your diet, I recommend avoiding meat from big supermarkets and asking your butcher if antibiotics were used in the rearing of the meat products you’re buying. Some animal products will state “antibiotic-free” on the label, which is always the better choice.
We’re beginning to understand how the gut and brain are hardwired and how they signal to each other. Research has linked meditation, which has benefits for mental health, with better gut health, in particular a more diverse microbiome and more “good” gut bacteria.
Mindfulness is not a panacea and it’s not going to magically make everything better. But it may well reduce your stress hormones which are ruinous for gut microbes. So if you are living a very busy, frantic life, taking a little bit of time out of your day and having a bit of calm and focus really will support your gut and many other aspects of your health. When it comes to gut health, it’s a science of marginal gains – form small habits that have important benefits.
In practice, meditation is about giving yourself some time in the day and prioritising it and yourself. I often take 15 to 20 minutes and focus on my mental processes and thoughts and escape a little bit from the pressures that we all face.
If you’re an adult, this ship has sailed but for new mothers, the most important thing that you can do is set up your child’s gut in early life. The very best evidenced way of doing that is breastfeeding. It will protect both your maternal microbiome and the infant’s gut. This is due to the living bacteria in the breast milk, which are transferred to breastfed babies, and the oligosaccharides in milk, which are complex sugars that are broken down in the developing gut, supporting the growth of friendly microbes in their digestive system.
Formula-fed infants have very different strains of bacteria in their gut that are more inflammatory and we know are associated with worse health outcomes. Some women can’t breastfeed so don’t have this choice but, if you can, the evidence is overwhelming that you should.
As told to Emily Craig
Dr James Kinross is a colorectal surgeon at Imperial College London, a microbiome scientist and the author of Dark Matter: The New Science of the Microbiome.